Oxford Lectures on Poetry Part 10

--------A simple child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death?

Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and when it was all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and Coleridge, and observed that a prefatory stanza was wanted, and that he should enjoy his tea better if he could add it first. Coleridge at once threw off the stanza as we have it, except that the first line ran, 'A simple child, dear brother Jim,'--this Jim, who rhymes with 'limb,' being the James Tobin who protested afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in the _Lyrical Ballads_ as Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting to the words 'dear brother Jim' as ludicrous, but (apparently) giving way for the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.

Now the poem gains in one way by this stanza, which has a felicity of style such as Wordsworth perhaps would not have achieved in expressing the idea. And the idea was not only accepted by Wordsworth, but, according to his own account, he had mentioned in substance what he wished to be expressed. It must seem, therefore, outrageous to hint a doubt whether the stanza truly represents the imaginative experience from which the poem arose; and I can only say, in excuse, that this doubt does not spring from reflection, or from knowledge of Coleridge's authorship of the stanza, for I do not remember ever having read _We are Seven_ without feeling it or without saying to myself at the end, 'This means more than the first stanza says.' And, however improbable, it cannot be called impossible that even so introspective a poet as Wordsworth might misconstrue the impression that stirred him to write. I will take courage, therefore, to confess the belief that what stirred him was the coincidence of the child's feelings with some of those feelings of his own childhood which he described in the Immortality _Ode_, and once or twice in conversation, and which, in a less individual and peculiar form, he attributes, in the Essay on Epitaphs, to children in general. But, rather than argue the point, I will refer to one or two pa.s.sages. 'At that time I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust'

(remark recorded by Bishop Wordsworth, _Prose Works_, ed. Grosart, iii.

464). Is not this the condition of the child in _We are Seven_?

'Nothing,' he says to Miss Fenwick, 'was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being' (_ib._ iii. 194). He then quotes the first stanza of _We are Seven_. It is true that thereupon he expressly distinguishes his own case from the child's, attributing the difficulty in her case to 'animal vivacity.' But I have already fully admitted that Wordsworth's direct testimony goes against me; and I have now only to call attention to a pa.s.sage in the Essay on Epitaphs. In that essay Wordsworth begins by saying that the custom of raising monuments to the dead 'proceeded obviously from a two-fold desire; first, to guard the remains of the deceased from irreverent approach or from savage violation, and, secondly, to preserve their memory.' But these desires, in his opinion, resolve themselves into one, and both proceed from the consciousness or fore-feeling of immortality, also described as 'an intimation or a.s.surance within us, that some part of our nature is imperishable.' And he goes on thus: 'If we look back upon the days of childhood, we shall find that the time is not in remembrance when, with respect to our own individual Being, the mind was without this a.s.surance.... Forlorn, and cut off from communication with the best part of his nature, must that man be, who should derive the sense of immortality, as it exists in the mind of a child, from the same unthinking gaiety or liveliness of animal spirits with which the lamb in the meadow or any other irrational creature is endowed; to an inability arising from the imperfect state of his faculties to come, in any point of his being, into contact with a notion of death; or to an unreflecting acquiescence in what had been instilled into him!' Now Coleridge's stanza, and Wordsworth's own distinction between the child and himself, do come at least very near to attributing the child's inability to realise the fact of death to that very liveliness of animal spirits which, as a sufficient cause of it, is here indignantly repudiated. According to the present pa.s.sage, this inability ought to have been traced to that 'sense' or 'consciousness'

of immortality which is inherent in human nature. And (whether or no Wordsworth rightly describes this sense) it was _this_, I suggest, that, unknown to himself, arrested him in the child's persistent ignoring of the fact of death. The poem is thus allied to the Immortality _Ode_. The child is in possession of one of those 'truths that wake to perish never,' though the tyranny of the senses and the deadening influence of custom obscure them as childhood pa.s.ses away. When the conversation took place (in 1793), and even when the poem was written (1798), Wordsworth had not yet come to regard the experiences of his own childhood as he saw them later (_Tintern Abbey_, 1798, shows this), and so he gave to the poem a moral which is not adequate to it. Or perhaps he accepted from Coleridge a formulation of his moral which was not quite true even to his own thoughts at that time. It is just worth observing as possibly significant that the child in _We are Seven_ is not described as showing any particular 'animal vivacity': she strikes one as rather a quiet, though determined, little person.

These remarks, of course, can have no interest for those readers who feel no misgivings, such as I have always felt, in reading the poem. But many, I think, must feel them.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April, 1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of English Language and Literature. A few pa.s.sages from the other lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult Professor Herford's _The Age of Wordsworth_, a little book which is familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the more admired the more they use it?

[2] These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, in _The Tables Turned_, where occurs that outrageous stanza about 'one impulse from a vernal wood' which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these statements, and many like them, are 'poetic,' they ought to remain startling. Two of them--that from the story of Margaret (_Excursion_, I.), and that from the _Ode_, 1815--were made less so, to the injury of the pa.s.sages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.

[3] _Goody Blake_, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge's _Three Graves_. The question as to the _Anecdote for Fathers_ is not precisely whether it makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is in the lines,

And five times to the child I said, Why, Edward, tell me why?

The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim, is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the effect so delightfully reproduced in _Through the Looking-gla.s.s_ ('I'll tell thee everything I can').

[4] Some remarks on _We are seven_ are added in a note at the end of the lecture.

[5] The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from Hazlitt and De Quincey.

[6] The publication of the _Excursion_ seems to have been postponed for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the world for thirteen years.

[7] _Evening Voluntaries_, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.

[8] _Poems on the Naming of Places_, iv. Keats need not have been ashamed to write the last line.

[9] ''Tis past, that melancholy dream,'--so he describes his sojourn in Germany.

[10] Wordsworth's Letter to Major-General Pasley (_Prose Works_, i.) contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of his hostility to mere militarism.

[11] I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.

[12] [This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh (_Comus_, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the quotation.]

[13] In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingrat.i.tude, cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in his poetry or in his life. 'I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,' the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was not so very unlike Wordsworth's. And neither poet would have found it difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or 'the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.'

[14] The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary (_Excursion_, vi.).

[15] The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the _Excursion_, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.

[16] This is just the opposite of the 'wise pa.s.siveness' of imaginative but unreflective feeling.

[17] Nature.

[18] I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture, but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth's mind who cares to return to them.

The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth, 'the visionary power' arises from, and testifies to, the mind's infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united with, a feeling or idea of _the_ infinite or 'one mind,' and of union with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet's experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about 'immortality' or 'eternity.' His sense or consciousness of 'immortality,' that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that 'he' belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an 'active principle' which is eternal, indivisible, and the 'soul of all the worlds' (cf. opening of _Excursion_, ix.). Whatever we may make of this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain entirely outside Wordsworth's mind in pa.s.sages like that just referred to, and in pa.s.sages where he talks of 'acts of immortality in Nature's course,' or says that to the Wanderer 'all things among the mountains breathed immortality,' or says that he has been unfolding 'far-stretching views of immortality,' though he may not appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth 'transitory,' but Nature always and everywhere _reveals_ 'immortality,' and Man (in another sense) is 'immortal.' Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except Wordsworth, may mean by 'man' and 'immortal,' and to try to get into _his_ mind.

There is an illuminating pa.s.sage on 'the visionary power' and the mind's infinity or immortality, in _Prelude_, ii.:

and hence, from the same source, Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone, Under the quiet stars, and at that time Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound To breathe an elevated mood, by form Or image unprofaned; and I would stand, If the night blackened with a coming storm, Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds.

Thence did I drink the visionary power; And deem not profitless those fleeting moods Of shadowy exultation: not for this, That they are kindred to our purer mind And intellectual life; but that the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not, retains an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, whereto With growing faculties she doth aspire, With faculties still growing, feeling still That whatsoever point they gain, they yet Have something to pursue.

An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of this feeling of infinity and the endless pa.s.sing of limits with Wordsworth's love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for instance, _Prelude_, xiii., 'Who doth not love to follow with his eye The windings of a public way?' And compare the enchantment of the question, _What, are you stepping westward_?

'twas a sound Of something without place or bound.

[19] _Yes, it was the mountain echo_, placed in Arnold's selection, with his usual taste, next to the earlier poem _To the Cuckoo_.

[20] This was Coleridge's opinion.

Sh.e.l.lEY'S VIEW OF POETRY

Sh.e.l.lEY'S VIEW OF POETRY

The ideas of Wordsworth and of Coleridge about poetry have often been discussed and are familiar. Those of Sh.e.l.ley are much less so, and in his eloquent exposition of them there is a radiance which almost conceals them from many readers. I wish, at the cost of all the radiance, to try to see them and show them rather more distinctly. Even if they had little value for the theory of poetry, they would still have much as material for it, since they allow us to look into a poet's experience in conceiving and composing. And, in addition, they throw light on some of the chief characteristics of Sh.e.l.ley's own poetry.

His poems in their turn form one of the sources from which his ideas on the subject may be gathered. We have also some remarks in his letters and in prose pieces dealing with other topics. We have the prefaces to those of his works which he himself published. And, lastly, there is the _Defence of Poetry_. This essay was written in reply to an attack made on contemporary verse by Sh.e.l.ley's friend Peac.o.c.k,--not a favourable specimen of Peac.o.c.k's writing. The _Defence_, we can see, was hurriedly composed, and it remains a fragment, being only the first of three projected parts. It contains a good deal of historical matter, highly interesting, but too extensive to be made use of here. Being polemical, it no doubt exaggerates such of Sh.e.l.ley's views as collided with those of his antagonist. But, besides being the only full expression of these views, it is the most mature, for it was written within eighteen months of his death. It appears to owe very little either to Wordsworth's Prefaces or to Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_; but there are a few reminiscences of Sidney's _Apology_, which Sh.e.l.ley had read just before he wrote his own _Defence_; and it shows, like much of his mature poetry, how deeply he was influenced by the more imaginative dialogues of Plato.

1.

Any one familiar with the manner in which Sh.e.l.ley in his verse habitually represents the world could guess at his general view of poetry. The world to him is a melancholy place, a 'dim vast vale of tears,' illuminated in flashes by the light of a hidden but glorious power. Nor is this power, as that favourite metaphor would imply, wholly outside the world. It works within it as a soul contending with obstruction and striving to penetrate and transform the whole ma.s.s. And though the fulness of its glory is concealed, its nature is known in outline. It is the realised perfection of everything good and beautiful on earth; or, in other words, all such goodness and beauty is its partial manifestation. 'All,' I say: for the splendour of nature, the love of lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action or just law, the wisdom of philosophy, the creations of art, the truths deformed by superst.i.tious religion,--all are equally operations or appearances of the hidden power. It is of the first importance for the understanding of Sh.e.l.ley to realise how strong in him is the sense and conviction of this unity in life: it is one of his Platonic traits. The intellectual Beauty of his _Hymn_ is absolutely the same thing as the Liberty of his _Ode_, the 'Great Spirit' of Love that he invokes to bring freedom to Naples, the One which in _Adonas_ he contrasts with the Many, the Spirit of Nature of _Queen Mab_, and the Vision of _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_.

The skylark of the famous stanzas is free from our sorrows, not because it is below them, but because, as an embodiment of that perfection, it knows the rapture of love without its satiety, and understands death as we cannot. The voice of the mountain, if a whole nation could hear it with the poet's ear, would 'repeal large codes of fraud and woe'; it is the same voice as the reformer's and the martyr's. And in the far-off day when the 'plastic stress' of this power has mastered the last resistance and is all in all, outward nature, which now suffers with man, will be redeemed with him, and man, in becoming politically free, will become also the perfect lover. Evidently, then, poetry, as the world now is, must be one of the voices of this power, or one tone of its voice. To use the language so dear to Sh.e.l.ley, it is the revelation of those eternal ideas which lie behind the many-coloured, ever-shifting veil that we call reality or life. Or rather, it is one such revelation among many.

When we turn to the _Defence of Poetry_ we meet substantially the same view. There is indeed a certain change; for Sh.e.l.ley is now philosophising and writing prose, and he wishes not to sing from the mid-sky, but, for a while at least, to argue with his friend on the earth. Hence at first we hear nothing of that perfect power at the heart of things, and poetry is considered as a creation rather than a revelation. But for Sh.e.l.ley, we soon discover, this would be a false ant.i.thesis. The poet creates, but this creation is no mere fancy of his; it represents 'those forms which are common to universal nature and existence,' and 'a poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.' We notice, further, that the more voluntary and conscious work of invention and execution is regarded as quite subordinate in the creative process. In that process the mind, obedient to an influence which it does not understand and cannot control, is driven to produce images of perfection which rather form themselves in it than are formed by it. The greatest stress is laid on this influence or inspiration; and in the end we learn that the origin of the whole process lies in certain exceptional moments when visitations of thought and feeling, elevating and delightful beyond all expression, but always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, reach the soul; that these are, as it were, the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our own; and that the province of the poet is to arrest these apparitions, to veil them in language, to colour every other form he touches with their evanescent hues, and so to 'redeem from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.'

Even more decided is the emphasis laid on the unity of all the forms in which the 'divinity' or ideal power thus attests its presence. Indeed, throughout a large part of the essay, that 'Poetry' which Sh.e.l.ley is defending is something very much wider than poetry in the usual sense.

The enemy he has to meet is the contention that poetry and its influence steadily decline as civilisation advances, and that they are giving place, and ought to give place, to reasoning and the pursuit of utility.

His answer is that, on the contrary, imagination has been, is, and always will be, the prime source of everything that has intrinsic value in life. Reasoning, he declares, cannot create, it can only operate upon the products of imagination. Further, he holds that the predominance of mere reasoning and mere utility has become in great part an evil; for while it has acc.u.mulated ma.s.ses of material goods and moral truths, we distribute the goods iniquitously and fail to apply the truths, because, for want of imagination, we have not sympathy in our hearts and do not feel what we know. The 'Poetry' which he defends, therefore, is the whole creative imagination with all its products. And these include not merely literature in verse, but, first, whatever prose writing is allied to that literature; and, next, all the other fine arts; and, finally, all actions, inventions, inst.i.tutions, and even ideas and moral dispositions, which imagination brings into being in its effort to satisfy the longing for perfection. Painters and musicians are poets.

Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were poets, though there is much in their works which is not poetry. So were the men who invented the arts of life, constructed laws for tribes or cities, disclosed, as sages or founders of religion, the excellence of justice and love. And every one, Sh.e.l.ley would say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is so far a poet. For all these things come from imagination.

Sh.e.l.ley's exposition of this, which is probably the most original part of his theory, is not very clear; but, if I understand his meaning, that which he takes to happen in all these cases might be thus described. The imagination--that is to say, the soul imagining--has before it, or feels within it, something which, answering perfectly to its nature, fills it with delight and with a desire to realise what delights it. This something, for the sake of brevity, we may call an idea, so long as we remember that it need not be distinctly imagined and that it is always accompanied by emotion. The reason why such ideas delight the imagining soul is that they are, in fact, images or forebodings of its own perfection--of itself become perfect--in one aspect or another. These aspects are as various as the elements and forms of its own inner life and outward existence; and so the idea may be that of the perfect harmony of will and feeling (a virtue), or of the perfect union of soul with soul (love), or of the perfect order of certain social relations or forces (a law or inst.i.tution), or of the perfect adjustment of intellectual elements (a truth); and so on. The formation and expression of any such idea is thus the work of Poetry in the widest sense; while at the same time (as we must add, to complete Sh.e.l.ley's thought) any such idea is a gleam or apparition of the perfect Intellectual Beauty.

I choose this particular t.i.tle of the hidden power or divinity in order to point out (what the reader is left to observe for himself) that the imaginative idea is always regarded by Sh.e.l.ley as beautiful. It is, for example, desirable for itself and not merely as a means to a further result; and it has the formal characters of beauty. For, as will have been noticed in the instances given, it is always the image of an order, or harmony, or unity in variety, of the elements concerned. Sh.e.l.ley sometimes even speaks of their 'rhythm.' For example, he uses this word in reference to an action; and I quote the pa.s.sage because, though it occurs at some distance from the exposition of his main view, it ill.u.s.trates it well. He is saying that the true poetry of Rome, unlike that of Greece, did not fully express itself in poems. 'The true poetry of Rome lived in its inst.i.tutions: for whatever of beautiful, true and majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus; the death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their G.o.d-like state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to make peace with Hannibal after the battle of Cannae'--these he describes as 'a rhythm and order in the shows of life,' an order not arranged with a view to utility or outward result, but due to the imagination, which, 'beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own idea.'